The American Leviathan - Nation

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News travels fast across the red desert bush of remote Djibouti. Even as US military reservists erect a field hospital around a cluster of tents and blockhouses near a desolate watering hole, dozens of tribespeople are waiting for treatment in orderly rows. They arrive with maladies of every sort: bad teeth, diarrhea, fevers, colds, arthritis. At the triage center, an elderly tribesman has had a thorn removed from his foot, a wound that had been infected for months. At the dental surgery station, Navy Lt. Bill Anderson, an orthodontist from Northfield, New Jersey, will over the next few hours extract a dozen rotting or impacted teeth using instruments that sparkle in the late-morning sun.

The reservists are attached to a Djibouti-based task force of some 1,800 soldiers, marines, sailors and Air Force personnel. Embedded with them is an aid specialist from the Agency for International Development, which provides guidance for the operation. She is reticent and refers questions to the agency's country leader, Stephanie Funk. The next day, Funk acknowledges that USAID's solitary representation on the triage mission is symptomatic of a new age in US foreign policy--one in which America, in peacetime as much as in war, is personified abroad more by soldiers than by civilians. "If we had the numbers and the money to do fieldwork, we would, but our budgets have been declining for years," Funk said in her office on the US Embassy compound in Djibouti City. "The Pentagon has got both numbers and money. For every fifty of them, there's only one of me."

Quietly, gradually--and inevitably, given the weight of its colossal budget and imperial writ--the Pentagon has all but eclipsed the State Department at the center of US foreign policy-making. The process began with the dawn of America's post-World War II global empire and deepened in the mid-1980s, with the expansion of worldwide combatant commands. It matured during the Clinton years, with the military's migration into humanitarian aid and disaster relief work, and accelerated rapidly with George W. Bush's declaration of endless conflict in the "global war on terror" and a near-doubling of military spending.

In addition to new weapons and war fighters, the Pentagon's budget now underwrites a cluster of special funds from which it can train and equip foreign armies--often in the service of repressive regimes--as well as engage in aid development projects in pursuit of its own tactical ends. Although these programs must be conducted with State Department approval and are subject to Congressional review, legislative oversight and interagency coordination is spotty at best. The Pentagon, meanwhile, is pushing for full discretionary control over these funds--a move that would render meaningless the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, which concentrated responsibility for civilian and military aid programs within the State Department.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has lamented the resource gap between civilian and military agencies, most pointedly in a July 2008 speech, when he warned of the "creeping militarization" of foreign policy. He has wryly pointed out how, given the Defense Department's $664 billion budget compared with the State Department's $52 billion annual outlay, Washington employs more military band members than it does foreign service officers. No one at the Pentagon, however, is calling for the restoration of State Department primacy over foreign affairs and a proper budget to finance it. Rather, Defense officials speak of a civilian-military "partnership" in which, some fear, an underfunded State Department would be reduced to a mere subcontractor for Pentagon initiatives.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has suggested she will re-establish the State Department as the fountainhead of foreign policy. But she has said little about the Pentagon's expanded funding authority, and her embrace of what she calls "the three Ds" of her mission--defense, diplomacy and development--implies DoD's preoccupations are in concert with her own. Nor has she suggested she might allow greater autonomy for USAID, where officials grumble about how their work is as routinely politicized by the State Department as it is by the Pentagon. Indeed, Clinton has yet to name a new permanent director.

Though Clinton has presided over a marked increase in USAID's budget, diplomats and politicians say an overhaul is way overdue. "Without a more robust aid agency," Richard Lugar, the ranking minority member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote in the August 9 Washington Post, "President Obama's pledge to double foreign assistance would be like adding a third story to a house that had a crumbling foundation." Lugar, along with Senator John Kerry, is promoting a bill that would give USAID the lead role in coordinating foreign assistance.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, is flexing its own policy-making muscle. As Bush's wars grew in scope, so too did the military's aid budget and its focus on nonlethal activities--what DoD once referred to as "military operations other than war." Now known by the conveniently vague and expansive handle of "stability operations," and funded by a war chest passed into law three years ago, these missions are often deeply at odds with the goals of diplomats and civilian aid workers. Perversely, the Pentagon is militarizing foreign policy even as it "civilianizes" the character of its activities abroad.

Civilians figure at least as heavily as generals and admirals in the pantheon of American militarism. It was George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld--with the collusion of Condoleezza Rice--who expanded and entrenched the Pentagon's franchise over foreign policy. Rumsfeld's contempt for civilian authority was demonstrated most clearly, and with devastating results, in the run-up to the war in Iraq. Aside from bulldozing the constitutional prerogatives of Secretary of State Colin Powell, he vigorously, if stealthily, subverted the nation's civilian leaders abroad. Before the US invasion, for example, he dispatched a three-man team to gather intelligence in several Middle Eastern states without informing the ambassadors of their activities, according to a source with intimate knowledge of the episode. The secret deployment has been widely interpreted as a direct violation of the executive Letter of Instruction to Chiefs of Mission, first signed by President Kennedy, which gave the US ambassador in his host country "full responsibility for the direction, coordination, and supervision of all Department of Defense personnel on official duty."

Rumsfeld also blocked NGOs from any substantial role in postwar Iraq, soft-stalling their efforts to obtain licenses to enter pre-invasion Iraq and stonewalling their requests for information on procedures once Saddam Hussein's regime had been destroyed. "The plans were classified," Sandra Mitchell, then a vice president for the International Rescue Committee (IRC), said in an interview at the time. "We would get answers like, 'We're working on it. Don't worry. We'll be handling this.'"

The results were calamitous, and since then the Defense Department has aggressively sought the support and expertise of civilian aid groups--so much so that InterAction, a coalition of American NGOs, was compelled to issue a code of conduct to its members to lessen the chances for blowback, which often comes from working with the military. "To the extent that we become identified with the US military, we become compromised," says George Rupp, president and CEO of the IRC. "We're trying to keep it from changing the way we do business, but things may be changing whether we like it or not."

Despite the Foreign Assistance Act's stipulation of State Department authority, the Pentagon accounts for nearly a quarter of America's budget for overseas direct assistance--up from near zero a decade ago--while USAID's share has declined to 40 percent from 65 percent during the same period. Moreover, as the Pentagon's funding capacity has expanded, so has its foray into humanitarian aid and social development. Directive 3000.5, a November 2005 Pentagon mission statement, defines stability operations as "a core U.S. military mission" to be conducted "across the spectrum from peace to conflict, to establish or maintain order in States and regions." It tasks US forces to develop, among other things, "a viable market economy, rule of law, democratic institutions, and a robust civil society," including "various types of security forces, correctional facilities, and judicial systems."

Any mission conducted "from peace to conflict...in States and regions" is by definition everlasting and all-encompassing, and Directive 3000.5 chills the foreign aid and diplomatic community. The document concedes that humanitarian and development work is often best performed by civilian experts, and it encourages their input. But it also makes clear that "US military forces shall be prepared to perform all tasks necessary to establish or maintain order when civilians cannot do so."

The Pentagon says it needs its own aid budget because assistance programs run by the State Department are overly bureaucratic. It argues that aid developed and administered directly by the Defense Department, such as the Pentagon's recent appeal for $400 million in emergency funding to train and equip the Pakistani army, will be more responsive and yield faster results. Critics respond that such a narrow focus on military concerns will crowd out other foreign policy priorities like the promotion of human rights, education and healthcare. "If DoD is concerned that civilian-led processes are too slow, then let's talk about how we fix those processes," says Gregory Elias Adams of Oxfam America. "Let's have a conversation about how the interagency process is broken and needs to be fixed. If civilian agencies do not have capacity to contribute to the mission, it will be military imperatives that carry the day."

In the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs, former ambassador J. Anthony Holmes noted how in June 2008 the State Department had only 10 percent more diplomats and support staff than it had a quarter-century ago, when there were twenty-four fewer countries in the world and US interests were concentrated in Europe and Northeast Asia. Unlike the military, which bases a fifth of its 1.6 million active-duty servicepeople overseas, the diplomatic corps posts nearly three-quarters of its people abroad. As a result, Holmes argues, the State Department lacks "surge capacity," the ability to train and retrain personnel or rotate them to hot spots without having to leave their posts empty in the interim.

Absent a far more aggressive restructuring of civilian aid and diplomatic agencies, their dependence on the military will only intensify. In April the White House backed away from a pledge to staff hundreds of posts in Afghanistan with civilians for lack of funding and said it would instead turn to the Pentagon. Meanwhile, efforts to set up an expeditionary corps of some 2,500 civilians under State Department leadership have snagged on interagency snits, Congressional lethargy and funding constraints.

The Obama administration has acknowledged the problem. In its budget for 2010, it calls for 1,300 new foreign service officers, and it is planning a near doubling of the State Department's foreign aid budget from 2008 levels--a step in the right direction, say aid workers and diplomats, but not nearly enough to meet the department's commitments. "I have never seen a better opportunity to rebalance the tool kit," says Gordon Adams, a Clinton administration national security expert and now a professor at the American University's School of International Service. "But there remains a serious discontinuity between the structure of Defense and the structure at State. One of the many questions [Secretary of State] Clinton will have to answer is how to deal with the military on a regional basis overseas."

It is overseas, after all, where US foreign policy is implemented, and it is there that the State Department's authority is so plainly obscured by the Pentagon's shadow. As part of a broader effort to reform the Defense Department's chain of command, the world was divided into operational zones in 1986. The centrality of these regional commands and the men who lead them--the best-known is Gen. David Petraeus, head of Central Command, or Centcom, which is responsible for US security efforts from the Persian Gulf to Central Asia--has increased as the Pentagon endows them with ever larger missions and budgets. In particular, the combatant commander has the authority to fund military cooperation agreements with governments in his area of responsibility, a mandate that was once concentrated within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. That prerogative alone gives the commanders enormous prestige with host governments at a time when their civilian counterparts, from ambassadors on down, have been pauperized by spending cuts that date back to Senator Jesse Helms's war on foreign aid in the 1990s.

In general, ambassadors and combatant commanders find common ground on many issues. But tensions, particularly in time of war, are inevitable. In 2003 then-Centcom commander Gen. John Abizaid wanted to build a $99 million counterterrorism facility in Jordan at the request of Jordanian King Abdullah II. The project was opposed as a needless extravagance by Edward Gnehm, US Ambassador to Jordan at the time. So Abizaid went around Gnehm by funding the training facility from his own budget, according to a source with intimate knowledge of the matter. (An e-mailed request to Abizaid's office for comment was not returned.) The New York Times reported on March 8, 2006, that for about two years the Pentagon had been dispatching Military Liaison Elements--special operations teams tasked with gathering intelligence on suspected terrorists and ways to destroy them--to various countries without the US ambassadors' knowledge. In Niger two years ago, the US chief of mission cut back the number of entry visas for US military personnel because of the country's political fragility and because the embassy lacked the resources to accommodate them, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.

If Command Strategy 2016 is anything to go by, however, the Pentagon has no intention of waiting around. Issued in March 2007, it describes Southern Command, or Southcom, which has responsibility for Latin America and the Caribbean, as a Joint Interagency Security Command that would "provide enabling capabilities to focus and integrate interagency-wide efforts to address the full range of regional capabilities." As Adm. James Stavridis, then-leader of Southcom, elaborated at the time, "We want to be like a big Velcro cube that these other agencies can hook to so we can collectively do what needs to be done in this region."

Needless to say, many of those "other agencies" are reluctant to go along for the ride, particularly given the US military's checkered history in Latin America, where the Pentagon first began working independently with foreign governments. In 1988 lawmakers passed a bill ordering the military to arrest the flow of narcotics into the United States from Mexico, intensifying the failed "war on drugs" and lending thrust to the Pentagon's neo-imperialist lunge into Latin America. "Southern Command should not be the coordinating agency, because then they become the face of US assistance in foreign regions," says George Withers, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America. "The agency that coordinates controls the agenda."

When he was chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Lugar dispatched aides around the world to quantify the effects of DoD's expanded presence overseas and its growing dominance of US security policy. The result was two reports--committee "prints," in Capitol Hill parlance--that provide an alarming account of how much of foreign policy has been ingested by the military. "As a result of inadequate funding for civilian programs," concludes the first of the two prints, released in December 2006, "US defense agencies are increasingly being granted authority and funding to fill perceived gaps. Such bleeding of civilian responsibilities overseas from civilian to military agencies risks weakening the Secretary of State's primacy in setting the agenda for US relations."

The report disparages the 12-to-1 spending ratio between the Pentagon and the State Department, which it says "risks the further encroachment of the military, by default, into areas where civilian leadership is more appropriate because it does not create resistance overseas and is more experienced." Left unchecked, it warns, the increase in the number of military personnel and Pentagon activities abroad could lead to "blurred lines of authority between the State Department and the Defense Department [and] interagency turf wars that undermine the effectiveness of the overall US effort against terrorism."

The report contains many examples of the need for civilian authority "to temper Defense Department enthusiasm." It cites an unnamed African country--"unstable, desperately poor, and run by a repressive government"--that appealed to the US military for help in fighting an insurgency. The Pentagon agreed and soon afterward hailed the nation as a "model country for security assistance." Civilian embassy officials, however, expressed concern at the proliferation of US military personnel there. "It would be a major setback," the print notes, "if the United States were to be implicated in support of operations shoring up the repressive regime, regardless of the stated intent of such training."

The wellspring for such operations is Section 1206 of the 2006 National Defense Authorization Act, which allocated the Pentagon $200 million to spend on lethal and nonlethal equipment, supplies and training to foreign militaries. Section 1206 remains a limited authority, though last year legislators extended its budgeting cycle to three years, added maritime security to its list of activities and topped up its allocation to $350 million. A key condition Congress laid down for 1206 approval--that the Pentagon submit its programs list to the State Department for "concurrence" or "dual-key" approval--remains. Despite this, 1206 funds have been invested in countries with highly autocratic governments.

The US government has a long history of bankrolling dictators in pursuit of strategic ends. But there is a difference between declaring such support as official policy--as is the case with Egypt, for example--and the Pentagon's dole, which Congress allots with only a perfunctory understanding of how the money will be spent. In August 2008 Senator Russell Feingold responded to the Pentagon's request for additional 1206 funding with a report that $6 million from the program had been given to the government of Chad, which according to the State Department is "engaging in extra-judicial killing, arbitrary detention and torture." Other recipients of 1206 funding are Algeria, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Tunisia, all of which have abysmal human rights records.

Conspicuously absent from the debate over Section 1206 was Condoleezza Rice. At the time, Senator Patrick Leahy wrote Rice several letters imploring her not to cede unprecedented power to the Pentagon. According to Paul Clayman, an attorney who has worked for the State Department as well as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and others who were closely involved in the debate, the staff on Lugar's committee were staggered by Rice's passivity.

In April 2008 Rice and Gates testified jointly before the House Armed Services Committee. In addition to their mutual desire for augmentation of the Pentagon's Section 1206 channel, Rice also endorsed a new Pentagon-controlled allocation under Section 1207 of the defense bill that could fund State Department projects contingent on the defense secretary's approval. At one point, Rice was asked by Congressman Vic Snyder whether she still believed ambassadors should be the most senior representatives of US missions overseas. Naturally, Rice answered in the affirmative. What was striking was the fact that the question had to be asked in the first place.

Congress is now pushing back--sort of. In its version of the Pentagon's most recent supplemental budget, lawmakers stipulated that authority over the Pakistan counterinsurgency fund should reside with the State Department at the end of fiscal 2010. The House version of the bill called for State to assume immediate control of the fund, but the Senate prevailed in delaying the transfer, noting the department's "lack of capacity."

On the other hand, the House also appears to be leaning toward DoD in the 1206 debate. In a June report on the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2010, the House Armed Services Committee soft-pedaled its earlier position that 1206 programs should be transferred to State. Instead, it committed itself to the existing "dual key" framework and averred that "whatever the final, permanent form these authorities take, the Secretary of Defense must play a primary role in generating requirements." The report also asserts that "the Department of State still lacks the capacity to execute these authorities."

The Pentagon shows little inclination to relinquish its authority. An internal DoD memo issued last November characterized civilian agencies as too weak to help in counterinsurgency operations and declared that the Pentagon should be ready to lead such missions absent a "whole-of-government" approach. The document, leaked in January, warned that it would take civilian agencies at least a decade to develop the capacity to work effectively alongside the military. In February an unnamed "senior Pentagon official" told Inside the Pentagon, a weekly newsletter, that the military needed "a great deal of budgetary flexibility" in order to "proactively get ahead of problems before they become disasters." In May, Michael Vickers, soon to become assistant secretary of defense for special operations, told Congress it should increase spending "several fold" for funding under Section 1208, a budget mandate exclusive to the Pentagon in support of "foreign forces, irregular forces, [and] groups or individuals" engaged in combating terrorism. The oversight mechanism for 1208 programs is considerably less rigorous than those associated with 1206.

Civilian Washington, in other words, has reaped its own whirlwind. It was not a military cabal but a civilian cadre--Clinton in the 1990s, followed by Bush and his neoconservative courtiers--who expanded the reach and lethality of the military, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union. As the executioner of foreign policy, so much of which is now imposed from the business end of a Predator drone, why shouldn't the Pentagon serve also as its judge and jury? The answer, of course, is that America is a republic, a nation not of men but of laws, and the laws say foreign policy must be charted by civilians. Complacent politicians have neglected this trust, however, and the military now defines US interests abroad as much as it defends them. That is the bill for a leviathan. It is the wages of empire.

About Stephen Glain

Stephen Glain, a Washington, DC-based journalist, author and columnist for the Abu Dhabi National, is writing a book about the militarization of US foreign policy

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The New Domestic Order - Nation

by Lizzy Ratner

September 9, 2009

DOMESTIC WORKERS UNION

Deloris Wright has been a nanny for twenty-one years. In the strange class warp of Manhattan's Upper East and West Sides, this places her squarely among the ranks of the invisible, a ministering ghost who is rarely seen and never heard. And yet, there she was on a startling spring Saturday, a 54-year-old Jamaican domestic worker standing at the edge of Central Park, demanding her rights.

"We take care of your children. We take them to school, to French classes, we clean your homes, do your laundry, and we care for your aging parents, right here in this neighborhood," she shouted into a microphone. "Now, with the economic crisis, we are thrown out into the street with no notice and no severance pay, no unemployment, no safety net, no nothing.... Some of our employers treat their pets with more humanity than they would treat us."

Before her, a crowd of several hundred supporters whooped and hollered. They were union leaders, young activists, sympathetic employers and, of course, domestic workers--women from a UN's worth of countries who understood Wright all too well. Patricia Francois, 50, a Trinidadian nanny, had recently been forced to leave her job after her male employer--a documentary filmmaker who lives opposite Carnegie Hall--allegedly punched, slapped and verbally abused her. Mona Lunot, a Filipina domestic worker, had spent her first nine months in the United States all but indentured to an employer who took her passport and denied her a single day off--a situation she endured until she finally escaped in the middle of the night.

Like many domestic workers, these women toiled in underpaid drudgery even during the best of times, members of a profession so devalued it is still excluded from many of the nation's labor laws. But as the economy collapsed, their lot grew even harder. So they headed to the Upper East Side--epicenter of the domestic trade, playground of Wall Street's bailout chiefs--to press their case for their own government rescue plan: the first ever Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights.

This bill, which has been battling its way through the New York State legislature for five years, aims to provide basic protections to many of the estimated 200,000 nannies, housekeepers and eldercare-givers who labor in New York State. Backed by a diverse coalition of labor and religious groups and even employers, it calls for severance and overtime pay, advance notice of termination, one day off a week, holidays, healthcare and annual cost of living increases, among other fundamental rights. By most accounts, it should have passed in June, but an epic power struggle in the State Senate halted all business for a month. Now domestic workers are hoping their bill will pass in September.

"We are fighting for the Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights, for respect, for recognition, for justice," declared Wright, rousing the crowd before sending it marching past the pre-war palaces of Wall Street honchos like Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Morgan Stanley co-president Walid Chammah and former Treasury Secretary and ex-Citigroup director Robert Rubin. On normal days some of these women might have turned in to one of these buildings, unseen and uncounted, the real invisible hands of the market. But on this day they sang and chanted: "We're fired up! We won't take it no more!"

Throughout the long history of American domestic work, women have come together to demand rights, respect, a livable wage and, literally, a room of their own (domestic workers have all too frequently been banished to basements, laundry rooms and couches). In 1881, for instance, members of an Atlanta group called the Washing Society successfully organized washerwomen to strike for higher wages. The twentieth century saw at least two extended organizing episodes--one in the '30s and one led by the Household Technicians of America in the '70s--as Eileen Boris and Premilla Nadasen explained in the December 2008 issue of WorkingUSA.

As the fight for the Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights suggests, a new movement is rising, with ambitions to take a mortal thwack at the industry's injustices. "We are looking to change the law, we are looking to make history, we are looking to get fair labor standards," says Francois, now a movement leader.

This latest domestic-worker uprising extends well beyond New York, though the Bill of Rights campaign is its most visible expression. In fact, throughout the past decade, nannies, housekeepers and eldercare-givers have been coming together in Florida, Texas, California and beyond--first a few women, then a few more in a rare kind of political parthenogenesis. Together, these women forged a movement that spans ten cities, several thousand members, dozens of nationalities and ever more groups. In 2007 thirteen of these formed the National Domestic Workers Alliance, a multiethnic, multilingual coalition; now it has eighteen member groups. Though they are all still evolving, their efforts have already garnered ecstatic praise.

"It is really a multiracial, multiethnic form of feminism that we haven't seen very often in US history," says Nadasen, a professor of history at Queens College. "Through their activism they are expanding our notion of what feminism means." Ed Ott, former director of the New York City Central Labor Council, adds that the campaign represents "a model project for people who are working under the most brutal conditions."

Others, meanwhile, praise the women for weaving three of our era's most important movements into one: a women's movement, striking out at the stigma against household labor as women's labor and therefore not really labor at all; a workers' movement, defying notions about what kinds of workers can and should be organized; and an immigrants' movement, melding the struggle for rights here with the struggle for rights abroad.

This new movement began stirring in immigrant enclaves during the Clinton years, as the country's rising appetite for domestic labor began increasingly to be satisfied by poor women from far-flung lands. "This generation of domestic-worker organizing really started in the mid-'90s out of the changes in the political economy," explains Ai-jen Poo, 35, the whip-smart lead organizer of New York's Domestic Workers United (DWU). "On the one hand," Poo says, "you had globalization pushing people out of their home countries in search of a means to support their families. And then you had global cities like New York that needed a workforce of low-wage service workers who would meet the day-to-day needs of the sort of white-collar workers who were operating the global economy."

If this sounds theoretical, it has nonetheless had very real implications for the country's growing domestic labor force (estimated at around 2 million). The ranks of domestic-worker activists are filled with globalization's refugees--with women like DWU member Barbara Young, 61, who lost her job as a bus conductor in Barbados in 1992 after the IMF pushed the government to downsize its transit force; and Linda Abad, 57, a Filipina domestic worker and organizer who opted to "join the global surplus labor" supply, as she put it, because the structurally adjusted Filipino economy made survival (and her kids' education) increasingly difficult.

Abad is a taut, quick woman whose story is instructive. When she left her family to find work in this country, she didn't expect a rosy transition, but she didn't expect the "discrimination" and "alienation" either: the New Jersey employer who refused to help with medical treatment after she injured her back on the job; the Park Avenue beauty magazine editor (married to a Goldman Sachs executive) whose building required Abad to ride the service elevator; the editor's frequent screaming episodes, which inspired one of the kids to do the same while hitting her and pulling her hair. "Because they have the economic power," she says, "they think they can do anything with their workers inside their homes." So she joined with other domestic workers to found the Damayan Migrant Workers Association.

Certainly there are instances of benevolence, but the women interviewed for this article cited a breathtaking range of abuses, from denial of minimum wage, days off, holidays and overtime pay to wage theft, verbal and physical abuse, sexual harassment, even slavery. Poo still gets teary when she remembers one of the first women who sought her help, a Jamaican housekeeper and nanny who was brought to this country by an electronics executive and his family at age 15 and held in latter-day servitude. For fifteen years, she raised their three kids and never received a salary because she was told that her mother was getting her checks. But the checks were never sent, and her employers gradually cut off her communication with her family. "Ultimately the way she escaped was that the kids she took care of saved their piggy bank money and gave it to her to run away," recalls Poo. "And she didn't want to press criminal charges because she didn't want to take the parents away from the kids."

Poo and her colleagues managed to win the woman a $125,000 settlement. For several years after that, DWU and other groups focused on the plight of individuals. But before long, domestic-worker activists recognized that if they really wanted to change the industry, they had to organize--an awareness that seems to have happened almost simultaneously across the movement. The members realized that "for every single case that our legal department might be able to resolve, there's always going to be another one or another ten coming through," recalls Alexis de Simone, 27, the former women's organizer at CASA de Maryland, a Latin American immigrants' rights group.

Put differently, they realized that they had to begin attacking the roots of domestic-worker exploitation, which extend at least as far back as slavery--in many ways the structural antecedent of modern domestic work--and touch on everything from the devaluation of women's work to the ravages of neocolonialism to the very institution that's supposed to protect people's rights. "The government is in this, very much so," says Abad.

The government has been an active player in the exploitation of domestic workers for years, but the cardinal example belongs to the 1930s: that's when the architects of the New Deal, when doling out labor rights, explicitly excluded domestic and agricultural workers (both predominantly African-American) from such landmark laws as the National Labor Relations Act. Arguments around the government's right to regulate the private sphere played a role in the decision, but skin color was clearly the defining factor. "It was an exclusion premised primarily around the issue of race, that Southerners would continue to have control over the labor force of the South," explains Nadasen.

Seventy years later, some of these wrongs have been partially righted--thanks largely to the last great domestic-worker movement, which managed to win federal minimum wage and other protections in 1974. But enormous gaps remain. "Casual" workers like baby sitters and "companions" for the elderly are still barred from minimum wage protections, and all domestic workers remain excluded from the National Labor Relations Act, which guarantees the right to organize, as well as the Occupational Safety and Health Act. And because most domestic workers labor in environments with fewer than fifteen employees, they are also excluded from such key civil rights legislation as the Americans With Disabilities Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and Title VII, which bars most kinds of employment discrimination. Add to this the difficulty of enforcing even the few protections that do exist--particularly for undocumented workers--and for many domestic workers it's still 1934.

All of which raises some weighty questions. How do you begin to undo all these decades of exploitation, particularly without the right to organize? How do you build power where there's been none before?

One increasingly popular answer has been to push for legislation creating rights for household workers. In 2003 New York City domestic workers persuaded the City Council to pass a bill requiring placement agencies to obtain signed promises from employers to respect minimum wage, overtime and Social Security obligations. Five years later, the women of CASA de Maryland led a successful campaign for a bill requiring employers in Montgomery County to provide workers with written wage and benefits contracts. More recently, a number of the groups have gone international, working with domestic-worker unions in South Africa, Trinidad, Hong Kong and elsewhere. Their current goal is to persuade the International Labor Organization to pass a convention protecting the rights of domestic workers by 2011.

Still, by far the biggest effort has been the battle for the Bill of Rights in New York--a campaign that is being closely watched by domestic workers across the country, though particularly in California, where groups have already begun plotting their own 2010 push for a bill. (In 2006 they nearly passed similar, if more modest, legislation, but it was vetoed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.) "We know that if it gets passed in New York, it's going to help legislative efforts across the country," said Beatriz Hererra, an organizer with People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER) in San Francisco.

On a sparkling afternoon, four domestic workers sat in the basement offices of Adhikaar, a women-led Nepali rights group in Queens, discussing the Bill of Rights. Escapees of Nepal's civil strife, they were mostly middle-aged and older, and their tales ranged from nasty, name-calling employers, to seventeen-hour workdays for $4 an hour, to one woman's four-year nightmare toiling for a family that refused to pay her or let her leave. These women know that the Bill of Rights won't solve all their problems; for that they'll need even greater transformations in women's rights, immigrants' rights and global economic policy. But when asked what the bill could mean, they shouted enthusiastically.

"We have to work seventeen hours a day, and hopefully with this we'll have to work less," declared a woman named Basanta. "It will be better than now!" added another named Brinda. "We can get our leave!" "Christmas Day, New Year!" "Minimum wage!" shouted others.

By most accounts, the quest for the Bill of Rights began out of discussions like this--specifically, out of the dreams of some 250 domestic workers who gathered in 2003 to discuss what it would take for them "to feel respect and recognition on the job," according to Poo. The resulting legislative odyssey hasn't always been easy. Even in the absence of any vocal opposition, some legislators (in particular, those whose constituents tend to be employers) have balked at some of the bill's most basic demands, like health benefits and severance pay.

Nonetheless, this past spring, the legislative gears finally began to turn, and after years of lobbying and forging alliances with labor unions, religious leaders and sympathetic employers, a Bill of Rights is close to becoming reality. Governor David Paterson supports the bill and has promised to sign it. On June 23 the State Assembly passed a modified version, a so-called Inclusion Bill that guarantees important rights like overtime, a day of rest per week and inclusion in state human rights and collective bargaining laws (though it leaves out important others). Now all that remains is for the State Senate to pass its version, which organizers hope will strengthen the Assembly version.

"At the end we're going to have what we all hope is protection for domestic workers, with some dignity in their work life, a real degree of enforcement for them, and a change in the discussion of how domestic workers should be treated," says State Senator Diane Savino, the Senate bill's lead sponsor, who has been pushing for a stronger version.

Will it be the dream Bill of Rights? Certainly it will be a powerful initial step, the first time a state has guaranteed domestic workers some of the rights and respect they have been denied for so long. But don't expect domestic worker activists to stop there. "The work has just begun," says Christine Lewis, a Trinidadian nanny and DWU activist. "To say that when the Bill of Rights comes through, that it's going to be a walk in the park--the work will just begin."

About Lizzy Ratner

Lizzy Ratner is a journalist who lives in New York.

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Institute for Policy Studies: America’s Bailout Barons

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Download Executive Excess 2009

By Sarah Anderson, John Cavanagh, Chuck Collins, Sam Pizzigati

The 16th annual Institute for Policy Studies "Executive Excess" report exposes this year's windfalls for top financial bailout recipients.

Ten of the top 20 financial bailout firms have revealed the details of stock options pocketed in early 2009. Based on rising stock prices, the top five executives at each of these banks have enjoyed a combined increase in the value of their stock options of nearly $90 million, according to the report, the 16th in a series of annual "Executive Excess" reports.

"America's executive pay bubble remains un-popped," says Sarah Anderson, lead author on the Institute study. "And these outrageous rewards give executives an incentive to behave outrageously, putting the rest of us at risk."

Key Findings

The Bounty for Bailout Barons: From 2006 through 2008, the top five executives at the 20 banks that have accepted the most federal bailout dollars since the meltdown averaged $32 million each in personal compensation. One hundred average U.S. workers would have to labor over 1,000 years to make as much as these 100 executives made in three.

Layoff Leaders: Since January 1, 2008, the top 20 financial industry recipients of bailout aid have together laid off more than 160,000 employees. In 2008, the 20 CEOs at these firms each averaged $13.8 million, for a collective total of over a quarter-billion dollars in compensation.

Wall Street Pay Dwarfs Regulator Pay: These 20 CEOs averaged 85 times more pay than the regulators who direct the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. These two agencies, many analysts agree, have largely lacked the experienced and committed staff they need to protect average Americans from financial industry recklessness.

"The lure of lucrative private sector jobs doesn't just siphon off talent from public service," says Sam Pizzigati, an IPS Associate Fellow and report co-author. "It also breeds corrosive and ever-present conflicts of interest: Why 'get tough,' as a regulator, on a firm that could be your future employer?"

Federal Response Falls Short: An eight-page table at the end of America's Bailout Barons tracks the fitful progress in Washington on various executive pay reforms. Several of these have strong potential to deflate the executive pay bubble.

The federal government, for instance, could give tax breaks and federal contracting preferences to companies that maintain a reasonable pay gap between their top executives and workers. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), in her proposed Patriot Corporations Act (H.R. 1874), would extend these tax breaks and procurement bidding preferences only to those companies that compensate their executive at no more than 100 times the income of their lowest-paid workers.

A generation ago, typical big-time corporate CEOs seldom made more than 30 or 40 times what their workers took home. In 2008, the IPS report shows, top executives averaged 319 times more than average U.S. worker pay.

The bulk of the debate over executive pay reform has revolved around questions of corporate governance, such as the independence of compensation committees and the role of shareholders.

"Governance problems do need to be resolved," notes IPS Director John Cavanagh. "But unless we also address more fundamental questions - about the overall size of executive pay, about the gap between the rewards that executives and workers are receiving - the executive pay bubble will most likely continue to inflate."

"Public officials in Congress and the White House hold the pin that could pop the executive pay bubble," says IPS Senior Scholar Chuck Collins. "They have so far failed to use it."

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Score One for Indonesia in the War Over Batik - NYTimes.com

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By PETER GELLING

JAKARTA — For Indonesians, it is a point scored in a long-running rivalry with their neighbor Malaysia: The United Nations has decided to recognize Indonesian batik as one of the world’s important cultural traditions.

After a run of what Indonesian nationalists view as Malaysia’s poaching of its culture, the announcement last week that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization would add batik to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list at a ceremony at the end of this month was especially welcome. To celebrate, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has asked all Indonesians to wear batik on Oct. 2.

“It is so important that the world finally recognize and acknowledge batik as an Indonesian heritage,” said Obin, one of the country’s leading fashion designers. “It is a part of our soul.”

But bragging rights to batik, the process of creating intricate patterns on textiles with wax-resistant dyes, is only one of a slew of issues — cultural, social and political — that have bedeviled relations between Malaysia and Indonesia of late. In June, things had reached the point where Malaysia’s defense minister felt it necessary to declare that, contrary to appearances, the two countries were not on the brink of war.

Indonesia and Malaysia’s numerous commonalities have often sparked disputes. Their historically fluid borders gave rise to populations that share both the Islamic religion and very similar languages. The two countries fought a real war over territory on the island of Borneo in the 1960s, and several conflicts over small, but resource-rich, islands and coastal territories continue today.

The most recent cultural squabble, however, is mostly one-sided. Malaysians, responding to a torrent of letters in Indonesian newspapers, say they are mostly perplexed by Indonesians’ strong reactions to suspicions that they are being encroached upon by Malaysia. Some young Indonesians, who refer to their neighbor as “Maling-sia” — “maling” means “thief” in Indonesian — have pledged their readiness to fight should war become necessary.

The most recent flare-up began with a song.

In early 2007, the Malaysian government began using a folk tune titled “Rasa Sayange,” or “Feeling of Love,” in its “Malaysia: Truly Asia” overseas tourism campaign. Indonesians, claiming the song as their own, began staging protests outside the Malaysian embassy in Jakarta.

Indonesian lawmakers entered the fray, and by December 2007, Indonesians were whipped into such a fury that Malaysia was forced to remove the song, as well as clips of dances that Indonesians also insist are theirs, from its advertising and apologize.

Relations were further complicated last May when a Malaysian naval vessel veered into the disputed, and oil-rich, waters of Ambalat, setting off another diplomatic scuffle and renewed claims of Malaysian theft.

Then there was the headline-grabbing escape from Malaysia that same month of an Indonesian starlet, Manohara Odelia Pinot, who claimed she had been tortured by her husband, a Malaysian prince.

The following month, reports that Indonesian maids in Malaysia were being abused prompted the Indonesian government to temporarily stop sending domestic workers there.

Anger toward Malaysia grew so intense here that the Malaysian defense minister, Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, felt compelled to offer a guarantee that there would be no war between the two countries. At the same meeting, his Indonesian counterpart, Juwono Sudarsono, warned the public not to inflate small problems into major ones.

Tensions dropped to a low boil until a few weeks ago, when the Malaysian government was again put on the defensive over a promotion for a documentary series on the Discovery Channel about Malaysia that featured a dance thought to have originated on the Indonesian island of Bali.

Apologies all around did not stop the ever-present throngs of Indonesians outside the Malaysian Embassy in Jakarta from pelting it with eggs and rocks.

It was in this context that Unesco was considering Indonesia’s claim that batik is part of its distinct cultural heritage and worth preserving.

Protecting batik, whether from cheaper printed imitations from China or efforts in Malaysia to copyright designs, became a national obsession.

The Indonesian government stepped up its promotion of the fabric significantly in 2007, calling on civil servants and the public to wear it more often and enlisting fashion designers to find more appealing uses for it. Batik is now a staple in upscale malls and galleries in Jakarta.

Finance Minister Sri Mulyani has become known for her elegant batik dresses. Many offices in Indonesia now observe “Batik Fridays.” Applications to copyright batik motifs have intensified; currently about 300 designs have been copyrighted in Indonesia. Most of those claims were made since 2007, according to industry figures.

“There is no question, really,” said Ari Safitri, 22, gesturing to the centuries-old batik patterns inside the Danar Hadi Museum in Solo, a Central Javanese city famed for its batik, where she is a guide.

“Everyone always asks about Malaysia,” she said. “But I tell them that we are sure batik comes from Indonesia.”

Historians and non-Indonesian analysts question Indonesia’s claims.

“For Indonesians to claim that batik is solely Indonesian is to stretch the point,” Farish Noor, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyank Technological University in Singapore, wrote in a recent editorial in The Straits Times.

“The post-colonial histories of almost all Southeast Asian states tend to over-emphasize the nation-state and its borders,” Noor continued. “This ignores the fact that the people of the region have long moved across the archipelago with ease, bringing — and leaving — their languages, beliefs and cultures.”

Malaysians, for their part, appear mostly perplexed by the Indonesian batik campaign. Jamal Ibrahim, a Malaysian, wrote in a letter to The Jakarta Post, “We heard about the controversy, but hardly any Malaysian has given it serious attention.”

Gunawan Setiawan, who sells batik made in a centuries-old workshop in Solo, brushed aside the controversy as nonsense, though he admitted he was happy that the squabble had at least sparked a popular resurgence of the fabric at home.

“Since the 1970s, the biggest demand for batik has come in the last few years because of this situation with Malaysia,” he said in the workshop, where women were applying melted wax in swirling motifs on lengths of cloth. “I’m not sure anyone can claim batik, but it’s been good for business.”

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Dutch Celebrate Henry Hudson’s Arrival in New York City - NYTimes.com

Cover via Amazon

By A. G. SULZBERGER

The celebration riveted the nation. The government spent years in planning, the news media tracked every development, and residents flocked to the events in droves.

The reason for all the hoopla was the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival in New York Harbor, which was marked with a week of events around the city that concluded in Lower Manhattan on Sunday. But the place where this anniversary is being celebrated so fiercely is the Netherlands, the small, waterlogged European nation of 17 million people 3,650 miles away.

The Dutch organized and paid for the week’s events, running up a tab of about $10 million. The Dutch media dispatched about 50 reporters to New York, with a major television station running nightly half-hour updates on the proceedings during prime time. And thousands of Dutch citizens crossed the Atlantic to take part, including Crown Prince Willem-Alexander, who declared New York the greatest city in the world.

But aside from perhaps hearing cannon fire, spotting the stately profiles of the Dutch sailing vessels shipped across the Atlantic for the occasion, or bumping into a gang of blond, blue-eyed sailors in Brooklyn Heights, New Yorkers, a busy bunch and long accustomed to spectacle, basically went about life as usual.

“It’s bigger there than over here,” said Babette Bullens, 38, who lives near Holland’s border with Belgium and was making her first trip to New York. “If you talk to New Yorkers, they don’t know what’s happening. It’s very disappointing,” she said in Battery Park on Sunday.

The reason for the Dutch interest, of course, is that the arrival of Hudson’s ship, the Half Moon, led to the founding of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. Hudson was British, but his financial backer was the Dutch East India Company. (“Who paid for the voyage,” the crown prince said, “really counts.”)

Dutch claims to the city ended nearly 350 years ago, when control was formally transferred to the British, yet they openly carry a lingering attachment, like that of a spurned romantic.

Jos Rozenburg, a commander in the Royal Netherlands Navy, said the week was a reminder of the country’s once-mighty past. “For us it was the golden age when the Dutch were all over the world,” he said. “It’s something we look back on with great fondness.”

“In a way, it’s refreshing,” said Russell Shorto, the author of “The Island at the Center of the World,” which examines Dutch influence on the development of New York. “The Dutch are a really self-effacing people.”

“The most Dutch thing about the Dutch contributions through history is how little you notice them, because they don’t promote themselves,” said Mr. Shorto, who lives in Amsterdam.

Stephen Chaffee, 54, an American who lives in Holland, came to New York with his wife, Josje, 51, who is Dutch. “She has a tremendous attachment to the idea that Holland contributed to American culture,” Mr. Chaffee said, as the Royal Marine Band played nearby. “I’m beginning to realize how important that is.”

Of course, the celebration has not gone unnoticed in the city. NYC & Company, the city’s tourism organization, has been heavily promoting it for months. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg stood alongside the crown prince at an opening ceremony on the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum on Tuesday.

“It was really an extraordinary week,” said Angela Vona, 66, of Manhattan, who attended as many of the activities as she could. “I talk about this to all of my friends and they don’t care.”

That was the case with many of the New Yorkers who stumbled on the celebration’s activities. “It’s just another event,” said Ralph Montuoro, 67, of Queens, getting off his bicycle to negotiate the mostly Dutch crowd in Battery Park on Sunday. “We didn’t even know about it.”

And even if some Dutch were disappointed by the level of interest, most went out of their way to say they understood. “New Yorkers have a lot going on here,” said Vivi van Leeuwen, 34, of Breda. “New York is the capital of the world, and the Dutch are proud of their history here and don’t mind sharing that pride.”

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In China’s Alleys, Shouting Vendors Sow Echoes of the Past - NYTimes.com

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By ANDREW JACOBS

BEIJING — Not long after daybreak, before the city begins its full-throated roar, the shouts and calls can be heard up and down the old alleyways and deep within the walled courtyards that form the crowded heart of the Chinese capital.

“Goat meat, goat meat!”

“Eggs, rice, eggs, rice!”

“Scrap, household scrap!”

With more emphasis on song than lyric, they are the marketing jingles of itinerant fruit vendors, sellers of roasted duck, and stooped men who have mastered the art of resuscitating blunt kitchen knives. Like the familiar whine of cicadas in August, their garbled calls are the soundtrack of the Beijing summer, and many residents look forward to the return of the hawkers’ glutinous rice cakes, mismatched crockery and pet grasshoppers that sing.

Even more numerous than the hawkers are the recyclers, sun-scorched migrants from the countryside who survive by collecting yesterday’s newspapers, spent computers or tattered cotton blankets that will be spun into next winter’s comforters.

“If you can’t yell loudly, you’ll starve,” said Chen Lin, 37, a bony, animated man who earns about $5 a day salvaging dead appliances and anything else containing metal.

“No one really knows what I’m yelling,” he said, “but they remember my song and this brings them out of their house.”

The singing hawkers and recyclers are reminders of the days when Beijing was a thickly populated maze of hutongs, or alleys, that crept outward from the grandiose imperial quarters occupied by China’s emperors and the officials and artisans who served them.

Cao Huiping, 45, a taxi driver whose childhood compound was stuffed with 17 unrelated families, recalls when vendors filled the air with a cacophony of competing tunes.

“One minute it would be someone selling sugar, then as soon as their song faded it would be the flour dealer, then the fabric salesman,” said Mr. Cao, whose home has since been replaced by an upscale mall. “Now I live in a building where people don’t even know each other and everyone shops at the supermarket.”

Gated apartment complexes are the hawker’s enemy. So, too, are the air-conditioners that drown out sales calls and keep residents inside.

The city authorities are no friends of the street vendors either. Stringent laws and urban management officials, known as chengguan, keep them on the run with fines and harassment. “The best time to be out is lunchtime, when the chengguan are on break,” said Meng Xiandong, 54, a vendor of dried sweet potatoes, as he nervously scanned the crowds.

A good place to get a taste of old Beijing is Qianmen, a poor but colorful quarter south of Tiananmen Square that is a jumble of twisting hutongs and ramshackle houses. On most days, one can find peddlers selling meticulously skinned pineapples, a man offering two kinds of honey — plain and medicinal — and an ornery cobbler who can resole a pair of shoes in as much time as it takes to down a steaming bowl of hand-shaved noodles.

Cradling a brass teapot and watching over three pairs of caged lovebirds, Wu Xiulong, 76, sat in front of the doorway of his courtyard and reminisced about the vendors whose arrival he used to await as a child: the bean-cake man, the corncob seller, the baker who produced the flakiest flatbread. “Oh, back then they were baked on both sides, so crunchy, with sesame seeds,” he said. “It was so delicious. Now they’re all gone.”

Zhao Cai, a 66-year-old knife sharpener, is one of the old-timers who can still be found wandering around with a beaten-up toolbox that doubles as a bench. His call is bracing but melodious, although once he sets to work on a blade, the noise of grindstone on metal brings out the old women with their beloved worn-out cleavers.

“I hate stainless steel,” he said as he pedaled the grindstone. “No one makes knives like they used to.”

Unsentimental and gruff, his accent betraying his hometown in China’s far northeast, Mr. Zhao has been plying his trade for more than 30 years.

“When you’re good at sharpening knives, you get to know everyone,” he said.

How good is he? Customers sometimes foolishly test his handiwork by touching the sharpened edge. “I’ve had ladies draw blood and swear they didn’t feel a thing,” he said.

As he spoke, there was a loud crash behind him, followed by a choking plume of dust. Workers in orange vests were tearing signs off nearby buildings, part of a government campaign to make the neighborhood more attractive to tourists who like a bit less visual chaos in their Old Beijing experience. “I don’t recognize some of the streets around here anymore,” he said before fleeing the advance of the demolition crew.

One man who needs no vocal announcement is Li Hailun, a grasshopper salesman whose wares, hundreds of wingless insects imprisoned in round, woven enclosures, produce a deafening, high-pitched symphony. From July to October, Mr. Li, 28, bikes around the city with his chirping quarry, each of which sells for 50 cents to a dollar, depending on the quality of the song and the gullibility of the buyer. Add a dollar if the critter comes in a graceful wooden cage.

Much of Mr. Li’s village, about a two-hour drive from the capital, is engaged in the grasshopper trade: women weave the cages, boys catch the insects and the men pedal them to nostalgic city dwellers. When sales lag, he heads to the gates of the nearest children’s hospital. Subtracting the occasional fine for vending without a license, Mr. Li pockets $200 a week, a tidy sum for a sorghum farmer biding his time between planting and harvest.

The bugs draw a crowd wherever Mr. Li goes. On a recent day, passers-by debated whether to feed them carrots, scallions or rice. A woman said that toddlers raised alongside a trilling insect were not easily startled by noise.

“When the grasshopper guy comes out, you know summer has arrived,” said a man who was seeking to replace the one, tethered to his rear-view mirror, that was on its last legs.

Mr. Li, ever the salesman, added his own poetic pitch. He declared that the Chinese had been raising grasshoppers for hundreds of years. Even Qianlong, a Qing dynasty emperor, was a connoisseur of the fighting variety.

“Everyone loves grasshoppers,” Mr. Li said. “When they sing, you can’t help but feel happy.”

Xiyun Yang contributed research.

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EurasiaNet - Killing Of Afghan Journalist Raises More Uncomfortable Questions

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Abubaker Saddique: 9/12/09
A EurasiaNet Partner Post from RFE/RL

Criticism and anger are mounting over the rescue of a Western journalist from Taliban militants.

The September 9 predawn raid in a remote corner of northern Afghanistan rescued "New York Times" correspondent Stephen Farrell. But four people died in the shoot-out, including Farrell's Afghan colleague Sultan Munadi and a British commando.

Afghan journalists are holding remembrance ceremonies and have staged protests across the country blaming international troops for Munadi's death. They have also criticized NATO commandos for leaving Munadi's body behind after the raid.

Angry Afghan journalists want this incident to be thoroughly investigated. They claim it is emblematic of a larger problem, when such operations often result in freeing Western hostages while caring little for Afghan nationals.

In Britain, media outlets are questioning whether military force should have been used, as negotiations with the hostage takers appeared to be making progress.

The two were kidnapped in northern Konduz Province while reporting on the recent controversial NATO bombing of two hijacked fuel tankers, which killed scores of people.

In a telephone interview with RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan from Paris, Reza Moini, a regional researcher with Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontieres), joined the call for a thorough investigation.

"Our efforts will not be limited to conveying condolences and expressing our sympathies," he says.

"What is important for us is that Munadi's killing happened under circumstances that have raised many questions. That's why our [formal] statement demanded an investigation into this incident. And we want the troops involved in this rescue operation to answer our questions."

Major Rethink

The raid was the second major incident this month which has brought the West's military role in Afghanistan into the spotlight.

According to Afghan officials, an earlier NATO air strike on two hijacked fuel tankers on September 4 killed scores of people, including many civilians. The incident has created rifts among NATO allies and fueled Afghan concerns about the West's military effort in the country.

A quest for a major rethink on Afghanistan is increasingly obvious in Western capitals.

Last week Britain, Germany, and France jointly called for a United Nations-led conference on Afghanistan to develop a plan for transferring more security responsibilities to the Afghan authorities.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced the initiative at a news conference in Berlin on September 6, saying they were launching it together with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Many hopes had been pinned on the August 20 Afghan presidential election, which had been expected to deliver a new administration that would work with its international partners to deliver improved governance and play its role in defeating the Taliban insurgency.

Instead, the elections results have been marred by allegations and investigations of fraud as the Afghan political elite splits into increasingly hostile camps.

In a week of bad news for the country, the London-based International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) issued a report on September 11 saying that the Taliban and other militants now have a "permanent presence" in 80 percent of Afghanistan. Another 17 percent of the country, according to the report, has "substantial" Taliban or militant activity.

Training Locals

Nobody seems to have clear answers to the troubling question of what happens next in Afghanistan.

In an interview with RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan, the new Canadian Ambassador in Kabul, William Crosbie, remained cautiously optimistic that despite the deteriorating security situation in southern Afghanistan, where 3,000 Canadians are battling Taliban insurgents, greater training of the Afghan forces could still help in improving the situation:

"We have been working closely in the [Kandahar] Province and the national government to train policemen and to train the Afghan national army to assume a greater role in providing security," Crosbie says.

"But I think the security situation in Kandahar reflects the deterioration in security in various parts of the country, which is of concern to us. The additional resources which ISAF will be bringing into Afghanistan, the increased training, the increased number of Afghan national security forces -- those will be critical to turn around the security situation."

But experts suggest that training Afghan security forces cannot happen in a political vacuum as clouds of uncertainty hang over the Afghan election.

Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan, has urged critics of the poll not to "jump to conclusions."

Meanwhile, despite an expected request for more troops for Afghanistan by top U.S. and NATO Commander General Stanley McChrystal, senior leaders in America's Democratic Party are now publicly questioning the logic of sending additional soldiers in harm's way.

Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and the chairman of the powerful House Armed Services Committee, is expected to oppose more troops for Afghanistan in a speech on September 11. This comes a day after the speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, said that she sees little support among U.S. legislators for sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan.

Such comments put President Barack Obama in an uneasy position.

Pelosi is the highest-ranking Democrat to signal that any White House or Pentagon push for more troops will be resisted in Congress. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, meanwhile, said he is urging Democrats to withhold judgment until Obama decides what to do.

Earlier this year, Obama ordered 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan, which would bring the total number of U.S. forces there to 68,000 by the end of 2009.

Editor's Note: RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan correspondents Jawad Mujahid and Sharifa Esmatullah contributed to this report

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Take Myanmar's Military Ambition Seriously: BIPSS

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Bangladesh needs to seriously take the issue of Myanmar's reinforced military presence along the border to safeguard its national security, a Dhaka-based think-tank says.

The Bangladesh Institute of Peace and Security Studies (BIPSS), a think-tank that deals with security issues in South and Southeast Asia, in a publication has suggested that there are many contentious issues with neighbour Myanmar and those need to be resolved for the national interest.

The issues such as Rohiynga and dispute over maritime boundary have daunted the relations between the two neighbours in recent times, says an article of its publication, BIPSS FOCUS.

It says Myanmar's recent strengthening of military presence in the Rakhine state, which borders Bangladesh, is a big concern.

"Bangladesh needs to take Myanmar's recent military ambition seriously," the publication says in an article, titled "Bangladesh –Myanmar Relations: The Security Dimension".

It says Myanmar has increased movement of troops while construction of concrete pillars and barbed-wire fences along the border has been sped up.

The military junta in Myanmar has also extended the runway of Sitwee Airport enabling it for operation of MiG-29 multi-role combat aircraft and all 12 MiG-29 aircraft of Myanmar Air Force are presently deployed at Sitwee, the article says. Land has also been acquired for construction of airport at Buthidaung, it adds.

The article says massive repair and reconstruction of road, bridges and culverts are going on in Western Command area while regular disembarkation of tanks, artillery guns, Recoilles Rifles, mortars in Buthidaung river jetty is going on.

Saying that such developments are "alarming" for Bangladesh, the article further says that Myanmar has commenced barbed-wire fencing along the border with Bangladesh since March 2009, and so far approximately 38 kilometer fencing is completed till end of July this year.

Considering all these issues, the article says: "It is observed that Bangladesh-Myanmar relations have developed through phases of cooperation and conflict."

"Conflict in this case is not meant in the sense of confrontation, but only in the sense of conflict of interests and resultant diplomatic face-off," it says.

The article warns that "unfriendly relations with Myanmar can benefit small insurgent groups living in the hilly jungle areas of the southern portion of the Chittagong Hill Tract, which can cause some degree of instability in the area and become a serious concern for national security."

The article also suggests that Bangladesh can benefit in ways by maintaining a good relation with Myanmar, which has a good friendship with China.

"It (Myanmar) is the potential gateway for an alternative land route opening towards China and Southeast Asia other than the sea," it says. "Such road link has the potentiality for a greater communication network between Bangladesh and Southeast Asian countries including Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore."

Moreover, the article says, with a rich natural resource base, Myanmar is a country with considerable potential.

"Myanmar's forests and other natural resources like gas, oil, stones are enormous from which Bangladesh can be benefited enormously," it says.

The article suggests the policymakers review the existing defence priorities to suit the magnitude of threat being faced by the nation.

"The policy regarding Myanmar needs to be a careful combination of effective diplomacy while safeguarding our security interests," it says.

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VOA News - New Bin Laden Tape Calls Obama Powerless to Stop Afghanistan War

By Steve Herman New Delhi 14 September 2009

A new audio message, directed at the American people - purported to be from al-Qaida mastermind Osama bin Laden - claims the President Barack Obama will find himself powerless to halt the American-led war in Afghanistan.

The latest audio recording, attributed to Bin Laden, again attempts to justify al-Qaida's September 11, 2001, terror attack on the United States as being part of the group's quest for the liberation of Palestine.

An image made from video, provided by IntelCenter shows a frame from the video released by al-Qaida showing a still image of Osama bin Laden, 14 Sep 2009

The tape was provided by an American-based firm - IntelCenter, which monitors terrorist propaganda. It says the 11-minute video shows a still picture of bin Laden while audio of the address plays.

In the recording, the man identified as Bin Laden reiterates long-standing grievances including American support for Israel and "some other injustices."

He puts forward a reading list of recent books, including one by a former CIA agent, which the tape says will clarify the "message" of the terrorist attack eight years ago.

The recording notes that the Obama administration includes key figures from the previous Bush administration, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

The voice, believed to be that of Bin Laden, thus concludes President Obama is a weakened man and powerless to change course in Afghanistan because of "pressure groups." And, if he tries, the tape says "his fate will be feared" to be like that of the assassinated President John Kennedy and his brother, Robert.

It is the first message believed to be from the reclusive terrorist leader since one in June, in which bin Laden accused President Obama of sowing new seeds of hatred against America among Muslims.

The United States now has about 60,000 troops in Afghanistan - the largest contingent in the 42-nation international force.

Following the September 2001 attack, the United States invaded to oust the Taliban from power in Kabul.

The Taliban had given safe haven to al-Qaida, which had carried out the hijacking of four airliners to attack New York and Washington, in which more than 3,000 people died.

Bin Laden is believed to be in hiding in Pakistan, along the remote mountainous terrain border with Afghanistan. Pakistani leaders have recently said they believe the terrorist leader is dead. But top American officials say there is no credible evidence to confirm that.

The audio recording, posted on a web site, includes an undated photograph of the al-Qaida leader. There is also a scene of a banner with an American flag in the background and the New York City skyline with the destroyed World Trade Center twin towers.

No fresh images of Bin Laden appear. He was last seen in video that coincided with the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attack.

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Obama, the Republicans, and health care reform : The New Yorker

Image by Renegade98 via Flickr

by Hendrik Herzberg

After the tea-partying, town-meeting-disrupting, pistol-packing mensis horribilis of August, more than a few commentators complained, as one of them put it, that “Obama should have seen it coming.” No one doubted that the current attempt to overhaul America’s uniquely wasteful and unjust system of health insurance and non-insurance would touch off the kind of demagogic, misleading attacks that have greeted every past attempt at ambitious reform, successful (Medicare) and unsuccessful (all the rest) alike. The plan is socialism; government bureaucrats will choose your doctor and prescribe your treatments; the economy will be ruined; taxes will crush you—all that and more was to be expected. But the predominant tone of opposition to the emerging Democratic health-care proposals, and to the President personally, came as a surprise to the White House and a profound shock to many who voted for Barack Obama last November.

Perhaps it was naïve, and obviously it was optimistic, to hope that once Obama—having been elected by a large and undisputed majority, unlike his two predecessors—took office the nastiness of the assault against him would subside. And so it did, briefly. But as the reality sank in that this temperamentally conservative President intends to make good on his substantively progressive promises, the fury returned, uglier than before and no longer subject to the minimal restraints inherent in a national electoral campaign aimed at persuading a plurality of voters. Lies and fantasies about health-care reform swirled together with lies and fantasies about the chief executive himself. Obama is plotting to set up “death panels,” government tribunals authorized to euthanize the old and sick. Obama was born in Kenya and therefore his very Presidency is unconstitutional. Obama will cut Medicare benefits to provide coverage to illegal aliens. Obama seeks to indoctrinate children in Marxist ideology and put teenagers in “reëducation camps.” Obama is a Communist. Obama is a Fascist.

This sort of lunatic paranoia—touched with populism, nativism, racism, and anti-intellectualism—has long been a feature of the fringe, especially during times of economic bewilderment. What is different now is the evolution of a new political organism, with paranoia as its animating principle. The town-meeting shouters may be the organism’s hands and feet, but its heart—also, Heaven help us, its brain—is a “conservative” media alliance built around talk radio and cable television, especially Fox News. The protesters do not look to politicians for leadership. They look to niche media figures like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and their scores of clones behind local and national microphones. Because these figures have no responsibilities, they cannot disappoint. Their sneers may be false and hateful—they all routinely liken the President and the “Democrat Party” to murderous totalitarians—but they are employed by large, nominally respectable corporations and supported by national advertisers, lending them a considerable measure of institutional prestige. The dominant wing of the Republican Party is increasingly an appendage of the organism—the tail, you might say, though it seems to wag more often from fear than from happiness. Many Republican officeholders, even some reputed moderates like Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, have obediently echoed the foul nonsense.

Over the summer, the organism probably succeeded, on balance, in accelerating the decline in Obama’s poll ratings, a decline that was inevitable once the inaugural glow faded, the economic crisis failed to vanish, and the messy, confusing legislative battles began. With the help of what appeared to be White House passivity, it certainly succeeded in demoralizing the center-left, stoking the fears of the ill-informed and persuading the press that health-care reform was in serious, maybe terminal, trouble.

Part of Obama’s task last Wednesday evening, when he delivered an address to a joint session of Congress, was to dispel the talk radio–Fox News miasma—to give heart to his nervous supporters in the House chamber and beyond, reassure them that he knows what he’s doing, and bolster their confidence by showing them his. In that, he succeeded. The address was his best as President. Some centrist positioning early in the speech—especially an implication that “those on the left” who favor a single-payer system and “those on the right” who favor leaving everybody to buy health insurance individually are equally “radical”—gave some a sinking feeling. (Medicare is a single-payer system. It is not radical.) But the President’s bipartisan pleasantries only made his firmness more impressive. His civility was matched by fight and fire. He called the death-panels claim—“made not just by radio and cable talk-show hosts but by prominent politicians,” some of whom were sitting in front of him—exactly what it is: “a lie, plain and simple.” And this:

If you come to me with a serious set of proposals, I will be there to listen. My door is always open. But know this: I will not waste time with those who have made the calculation that it’s better politics to kill this plan than to improve it.

Obama is sometimes faulted for conducting government by speech. But this speech was part of a patient strategy that, despite August’s rough weather, is looking increasingly sound. In 1993, President Clinton delivered a similarly well-received health-care address on Capitol Hill. But he then dumped a detailed, already-worked-out bill in Congress’s lap. The implication: Take it or leave it. Obama has left the bill-writing to the legislators (with intense White House kibitzing, of course) and has waited until the stretch to take the reins. When Harry and Louise torpedoed the Clinton plan’s popularity, Democrats panicked and abandoned the foundering plan. Obama’s approach made it difficult for him to stump for “his” plan, because its shape was necessarily unknown; now his numbers are slipping, too. But slipping poll numbers are less apt to panic members of Congress who have invested themselves in the shaping of the legislation and have had time to reflect on what followed failure last time: the Democrats lost control of the House for the first time in forty years.

Obama’s treatment of the “public option”—a kind of mini-Medicare that would compete with private insurance in a limited way—encapsulated his strategy. He defended it passionately, convincing many liberal doubters that he truly believes in it and knows that it would yield better care at lower cost. He also made it clear that he prefers reform without the public option—but with near-universal coverage and an end to “preëxisting conditions,” arbitrary cancellation of insurance, and the fear that losing or changing your job will cost you your savings and perhaps your life—to no reform at all. If it were up to the House alone, of course, the public option would be a lock. But in the filibuster-hobbled Senate the fate of reform may come down to the whims of a tiny handful of preening moderates from states that are mostly empty of people, notably the Democratic chairman of the Finance Committee, Max Baucus, of Montana, and Olympia Snowe, Republican of Maine.

Bipartisanship is a fine sentiment and an appealing tactic, but where health care is concerned it was never a great idea. The boorish South Carolina Republican who shouted “You lie!” at the President after he said, truthfully, that reform “would not apply to those who are here illegally” did the public weal a favor by underlining bipartisanship’s futility. A bill that reflects a necessary compromise among Democrats is bound to be stronger than one that reflects an unnecessary compromise between Democrats and Republicans. And that’s no lie

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